Ludwig - Phase II

Discussion regarding early stompbox technology: 1960-1975 Please keep discussion focused and contribute what info you have...
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e45tg4t3
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Post by e45tg4t3 »

hi there guys... does anyone has some more info or maybe schematics of the Lugwig Phase II Synthesizer?
this thing looks like an UFO http://nos-tone.com/Ludwig.html here some pics where you can see that everything is glowing^^ that´s just fantastic^^

Benny

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analogguru
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Post by analogguru »

Here is your chance to buy one....:
https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V ... 0010426801
The last was on evilbay in august this year.

And believe me, it is worth more than spending the money for eight bootweak-pedals:

Main board:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... m-full.jpg

back of top board:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... op-pcb.jpg

How the switches look:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... itches.jpg

Controls:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... -panel.jpg

Foot controls:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... al-lit.jpg

What was wrong with this one:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... orting.jpg
(there is a rivet bit jammed in the switch in the center of the shot)

schematics:
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... ematic.jpg
https://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/c ... ematic.jpg

pictures were taken by Sir H C

analogguru
There´s a sucker born every minute - and too many of them end up in the bootweak pedal biz.

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Post by e45tg4t3 »

thank analog guru... well if i would have the money it would be mine...well now i have something to study the next few days^^ thanks alot

Benny

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Emanuele
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Post by Emanuele »

I would love to make a sort of clone of it..it's been the secret weapon of one of the best Sonic Youth's records before some bastard stole it to them...

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Post by uncleboko »

Tip for photographing circuits: tape to a white door on a bright day, if you have a steady hand it should then be possible to take a clear picture face on. If not, rest the camera on something steady. A picture taken at an angle with flash may not be as useful.

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Post by R.G. »

I spent about six years one month back in 2004 trying to make sense out of the schemos they have taped inside the unit. The results are up at GEOFEX if anyone ever reads that. I tried to paste together all the board schemos with the implied wiring shown as wiring tags.

It's not complete, but there's enough there to understand it a bit, which is what I was after. There's some distortion implemented in an odd way, an "animation" section which makes a control voltage for two bandpass filters. The bandpass filters move in several different ways depending on the animation settings and sliders; I believe the foot pedal lets you sweep this manually too.

Before I got through I decided it was too big and complex to be workable as a replica effect, except perhaps as inspiration.

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Post by Rorer714 »

analogguru wrote:Here is your chance to buy one....:
https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?V ... 0010426801
I friggin' LOVED reading this auction! Thank you. It made my day! I just had to respond to some of what this tool wrote. I -might? hopefully?- be preaching to the choir here.

"I'm a realtor. I made a lot of money in 2002 -2005. I bought some cool gear. Now i have to sell it all or go live under a bridge embankment.."
Considering that the Phase II did not sell, I'd say that he'd better go stake out that bridge embankment quickly because there aren't that many good ones left. They are all occupied by honest, hard working people with families who lost their homes and everything they own because some pushy RWA (more on that in a minute) promised them the moon and the stars with no down payment and super low interest so that he could get that all-important signature and the commission it brings him, while quickly glossing over the quadrupling interest rate and five figure balloon payment due after one year. I'm sure that he acted like these family's (often young families just starting out) best friend, taking their calls at any time of the day or night, treating them to lunch at Chili's, asking after the kid's health and all that; but he was out of their lives with that piece of paper before the ink dried. Well dude - it's true; payback really is a b!tch. Not only do these families now occupy the best bridge embankments, but they will probably try to kill you on sight if they ever see you, providing that there are any spaces left for newly homeless families to live since the developers needlessly paved over everything in the pursuit of profit.

"i thought it ($) would never end."
Cry me a river... History is full of people like this, with the same sad story. Remember the mid 1990's? I worked in IT then. I saw everyone around me going crazy and spending all of their newfound money on Internet startup company stock. I used to say to them "sure, it's a great domain name, but what do they DO? Where exactly is the profit generated?". Nobody ever really answered that question with anything more than vaguaries at best. It used to strike me as insane, how they could not hear what they were saying. They were sitting there telling me plainly that they had no idea where the money would come from, yet pouring their money into it and telling me that I should do the same. I heard what they were saying loud and clear, but they seemed to have a mental block against it (one called greed). Well, I never invested one single penny. And come the year 2000 I still had everything that I had in 1997 while those people were riding the bus and crying to anyone who could stand to listen to them. They asked for things like government bailouts and were turned down flat, as they should have been. It's nobody else's fault if you are greedy and it causes you to lose everything; furthermore it puts you at the bottom of everyone's "people who I care about" list. Nothing created by man can ever be endless (ie. "i thought it ($) would never end.").

"being a guy with no technical knowlege but a bonefide RWA (Realtor with Attitude) I figured i could fix it myself"
Thank you for that. Without people like you, many others would have a lot fewer customers. And by the way, yes, they DO charge you more than they charge everyone else.

The following three quotes fall under the heading that the more someone tells you that they are honest and not lying, the more that they are dishonest and are lying.

"I paid somewhere over 3K but i honestly don;t remember how much"
"i think it was more like 3500 to be frank"
""My 1700 plus feedbacks will tell you that I'm not a lying scum"


As for that last one, 1,774 feedbacks with a percentage of 98.4% is nothing to brag about. That is NOT a good number. Especially after eBay changed the way that it calculates the numbers a few months ago. This guy has four negative feedbacks IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS alone. I would not touch him with a ten foot pole. I myself have had two eBay accounts since 1997. Together they total around 2,000 transactions. My percentage on both of them is 100%. Not that I normally mention this in my auctions, anyway I don't have to because it speaks for itself. But if I had this tool's feedback record I certainly would not call attention to it and use it to show how "I'm not a lying scum." However, I'm sure that this dude considers being honest 98.4% of the time to be exemplary; and who knows? In his line of work it might be.

So, member2165 (you are at least aptly named - you are certainly a member), if you happen to see this post remember this; you reap what you sow. People like you have caused a lot of pain for people who did not deserve it. You don't ever get away scot-free when you do that. I am SO glad that I am not you. And you ain't gonna get no $2,500 for a broken Phase II. In case nobody told you, you got burned if you really paid $3,000 or $3,500. And then you broke it and tried to tell the rest of us that we were getting a deal because you are selling it for less than you paid for it. The pedal collecting community is not stupid. Obsessed? Surely. But not stupid. Phase II's no longer sell for anywhere near $2,500. Heck, these days you would be lucky to get that much for a mint Sythi Hi-Fli (with chrome stand). I certainly don't have to tell you that the economy is driving prices way down. So what makes you think that anyone is going to pay $2,500 for a broken Phase II when working examples have sold for under $1,000?

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Post by soulsonic »

Rorer,

You may have been preaching to the choir, but it was a good sermon!
:applause:

Why in the hell is that guy charging $42 for UPS Ground? That thing should be $25 at the absolute max. I shipped a much larger and probably equally heavy package to NY last week and it was only $18. So, he's even trying to rip someone off on the shipping too. What an idiot!

I'd pay $300 for that thing, and totally feel like I got my money's worth IF I could still get it to work after him and his "tech" monkeyed around in it.
"Analog electronics in music is dead. Analog effects pedal design is a dead art." - Fran

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Post by toneman »

I remember when R.G. posted the links to the rev-eng schemos at the "other" forum :)
Don't know why R.G. spent so much time on the rev-enging :?:
RonSounds sells the "factory" schemos for a few bucks :!:
I discovered this quite by accident several months ago.
BTW, the 2 schemos look muchly similar except for the "european way" R.G. drew the resistors.
The only thing in the schemo that really interested me was the "fuzz animation".
Reminds me of the Synthi-Hi-Fli in terms of the controls and the hype :lol:
keep it fuzzin'
T
Tone-to-the-Bone

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Post by Rorer714 »

Thanks soulsonic - and there were two more things I forgot to mention about this tool and his auction. One is that I am not against realtors per se. Just the bad ones. And I can tell that he was a bad one. He said that he made a lot of money in that certain period of time, but now he is about to live under a bridge. That's the M.O. of a bad one. A good one did not make crazy money then, just decent money; and they are still in business making decent money, probably not as much as before but they are not fighting for bridge space. This guy made crazy money by promising the world to people for little or no money down, knowing full well that they would not normally qualify for a home loan and that after one year they would never be able to pay the balloon payment and cope with the hugely increased interest rate. He knew full well that most of the people he sold houses to would be out on the street after 365 days. But he did not care, as long as he got that signature. And there is the fact that he proudly calls himself an RWA, Realtor With Attitude. I wish that we could lock people like this up and throw away the key. I'd let one serial killer out for each one of these guys that takes his place. The serial killer will ruin the lives of what, ten people and their families? Fifteen? Five? Whatever the number, it's not good. But these greedy realtors and developers ruin thousands of lives. And the serial killer can't really stop what he does, it's a sickness to be sure and most of them say that they would rather have been born differently. But the bad realtor knows damn well what is going on and chooses to do it anyway. Not that I support serial killers, but I think you get the point.

The other thing is how he claimed not to remember how much he paid for the Phase II. Give me a break dude... This guy made his living with numbers. Profit margin is his religion. He knows EXACTLY what he paid for everything that he owns. When he wines and dines some young family to try to dazzle them into signing the contract, he knows exactly how much he is spending in relation to how much commission he is going to make if they sign. He knows what he paid for a candy bar when he was five years old - and he is going to forget spending over $3,000 on an effects pedal? Would YOU forget that? I wouldn't!

OK my soapbox is going back into the closet. Time to work on new photos.

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Post by sean k »

I read the guys diatribe, the ebay sellers, and the story about the tech being unable to find where two wires came from is pure dribble. Its usually very easy to find where only two wires, which have been in place for thirty odd years, go to... and he had a schematic right there so it's actually a little easier than straight forward... Yup' the mans lying through his teeth.

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Post by e45tg4t3 »

So guys... some time after my first thought about this machine i found some better scans of the schematics. So if somebody is interested here they are: Image
Image

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Post by Dirk_Hendrik »

Thanks!
That schematic could use some redrawing for readability! First time I ever saw a schematic going "around the corner" :mrgreen:
Sorry. Plain out of planes.

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Post by uncleboko »

It's a hideous muddle of a circuit.

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Post by e45tg4t3 »

well the ludwig is on place 4 on my todo list:
1: Electrax Synthax-100
2: EHX Microsynth
3: Some Strange Japanes Mini Guitar Synth
4: Ludwig Phase II
but one project after another... but if i get everything finished i will post the results here^^

Benny

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Post by R.G. »

Dirk_Hendrik wrote:Thanks!
That schematic could use some redrawing for readability! First time I ever saw a schematic going "around the corner" :mrgreen:
Yep. That's what the Ludwig P2 schematic(http://geofex.com/FX_images/Ludwig%20P2.gif, from March 14, 2004) at geofex is - a redrawing of those schemos plus headscratching about what the off-board wiring really is from the cryptic notes on the schemos, plus more headscratching and inference from photos of the wiring of an actual unit.

I suspect that there is at least one defect in the schematic which could be corrected in working with an actual unit in hand, but all I had was photos and scans when I did this a bit over five years ago. :lol:

I had intended to do PCB layouts of it, but when I got it to that point I realized that the chances of anyone except a very skilled circuit builder finishing one were very small. So once I could see the workings and what it was doing, I dropped the PCB idea. If I were building it today, I'd do it much more directly, bagging the odd discrete filters and using OTA based state variable filters, which should cut the filters section down to two dual OTAs per filter. The voltage control, distortion, etc could remain discrete, or be replaced by more modern stuff, to taste.

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Post by ISW »

Hi Benny,

Did you ever finish the Synthax? I have just come across my set of plans and thought that I might build one. I see that there are a few mistakes when comparing the schematic with the parts list but they should be easily fixed.

Regards,

Ian

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Post by borislavgajic »

ISW wrote:Hi Benny,

Did you ever finish the Synthax? I have just come across my set of plans and thought that I might build one. I see that there are a few mistakes when comparing the schematic with the parts list but they should be easily fixed.

Regards,

Ian
:thumbsup

could you share it with us?
please?
thanks

Boris

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Post by ISW »

Hi Boris,

I am still checking the schematic against the parts list, but so far I have identified the following:
R19 is 10K on the PL but 18K on the schematic (input processor),
R28 is 330K on the schematic but 530K (a typo?) on the PL (Bass generator),
C21 on the schematic is .1uF, but .01uF on the PL (Leslie simulator),
C44 is 1uF on the schematic (VCA) and 10 uF on the PL. This one has been amended from 1uF on the PL so it is probably just missed on the cct. diag.
There are also contradictions on R205 & R205 (harmonic generator) and the transistor that they bias is not labelled nor called up on the PL.

I will post more if there are any.

Regards,

Ian

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Post by e45tg4t3 »

Hi there guys,
i also found some not so good looking things in the schematics..
you may need to check mine with the originals... mine should be ok but yeah, you can never know :D
so here they are: ftp://epa-art.dyndns.org/Synthax%20100/
I post them here, but they are NOT verified, nor do i know if they are correct.. if someone of you find some mistakes feel free to correct them and to share it with us (maybe in a new thread)...
I never got around building it because it´s just big, i mean really big, and some of the ic's are hard to come by these days, for example the CA3080.. but this could be replaceable with the LM13700...
so it is up to you to do what you want with it, just keep it free and share it like i do^^

Best Regards

Ben

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